Ms. Jarcho has also directed “Dreamless Land,” which is being presented at the Abrons Arts Center by the New York City Players (the playwright Richard Maxwell is the group’s artistic director and Ms. Jarcho a member). She knows the look she wants — she favors elegantly symmetrical stage compositions here — and the tone: deadpan and dreamlike, with comedy and menace battling for the upper hand.

The script doesn’t follow conventional storytelling paths, though the first scenes set out an easy-enough-to-understand scenario. Haley (Jenny Seastone Stern), a teenager, has a best friend, Morton (Ben Williams, recently so excellent in “The Select”), who is going to visit his estranged father (Richard Toth) in Las Vegas. Earlier we see the troubled marriage of Morton’s parents, Carver (Mr. Toth) and Joyce (Linda Mancini), the threat of domestic violence hovering.

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Ben Williams (front), and Jenny Seastone Stern in “Dreamless Land,” a new play written and directed by Julia Jarcho.Credit...Rob Strong

The cast is top-notch, each actor adding nuance to the prevailing style of unsmiling affectlessness (a crew of Buster Keatons). As “Dreamless Land” progresses, though, it becomes harder to follow.

Ten years pass. Mr. Williams’s Morton has morphed into Martin, Haley’s live-in boyfriend. (Are Morton and Martin the same person? I’m not sure.) There are characters called Joyce and Carver, but their identities shift from scene to scene. In one, Joyce is an exotic dancer chatted up by Carver in a bar. In another, she’s a karaoke-lover who belts out Duran Duran by night and by day wakes up next to ... Carver. Carver is an international man of mystery, or a freelancer, or a creepy seducer of Haley. Sometimes Joyce is Haley’s boss, full of secret troubles.

There are hints that these odd, dreamlike scenes are just that: dreams or stories that Haley tells herself, populated by versions of the people she encountered when young. And the changes in style — some parts riff on secret-agent-type movies, some on rom-coms — seem less like investigations of storytelling than, well, slight changes in style.

Ms. Jarcho, whose influences here include Beckett, maybe “Through the Looking Glass” and, no doubt, the work of Mr. Maxwell, pokes around in situations, but doesn’t quite dramatize them. Talk is action here, and the humor comes from Ms. Jarcho’s controlled use of language as she catches and sometimes subverts the flattened-out rhythms of daily speech. (Haley: “Does he sound like someone who works in an office? Or... ” Morton: “He works in a freelance.” Haley: “I know, you said.” Morton: “So that’s how he sounds.”)

Watching “Dreamless Land” can feel like eavesdropping on a private conversation — individual bits may capture your fancy, but you don’t have enough information to stay interested. As an audience member, you’ll be pardoned for feeling superfluous.